For what it's worth, they recently changed the 15" MBP to have the option of a 1680 by 1050 screen. I don't know if it is an IPS screen but I don't think that it is a cheap TN panel.
It's not an IPS screen, but it does make going in to work and looking at the cheapo sony laptop they bought me incredibly painful. It's quite pretty, but I imagine there is a lot of room for improvement, especially with respect to vertical viewing angle.
I was about to buy a macbook for this very reason, but then found the Lenovo T500 with the same screen (although not LED-backlit).
I bought it off ebay for a fraction of the macbook price (cheap as a 3G iPad)), and I don't worry nearly as much about spilling water on the keyboard as I would with a macbook.
It's sad that this display option is fairly rare on 15" laptops, many either giving you too low resolutions (1366x768) or absurdly high resolutions (1920x1080)
The absence of a 1680x1050 screen option on the MacBook was one of the two reasons I didn't buy one when I last upgraded. Now I've just got to decide whether to sacrifice the freedom of Ubuntu for the polish of MacOS.
